Clients come to us with all kinds of questions or issues related to improving their users experience. Often they are unsure about where to start or how to get us involved. Here are the answers to some common questions that we often hear, but if you are still unsure or would like more information wed love to hear from you.

We want to redesign, where do we start?

The start of a redesign project is a great time to get us involved. User research is most effective when it’s done early in the project. A redesign is a big job so it might be best to talk to us in person.

Services involved in a redesign:

Interaction design is the process for developing the ideal way that users will interact with a system or screen.

Visual design adds life to a system. It can delight, evoke emotions, persuade users, and help users interact more easily with a screen.

Usability testing allows us to observe your customers using your system to find out what their actual issues are.

How do your services fit our process?

In most cases your organisation will have its own way of managing projects. We are used to fitting our services into different processes. The most common processes we see (at a very general level) are the waterfall process and agile process. Of course, if you are following a user-centred design process, then that’s even better.

Our system doesn’t work for our users and we don’t know why?

The best way to find out how your website, or system, or process, is working for your users is to study them using it. A number of our services are designed to enable us to do this.

Related services:

Usability testing is the most common way and involves getting small numbers of your customers (typically 5 – 10) in to watch them.

Field studies are best if the environment that someone uses a system is important. This will often be the case

Web Analytics gives us clues about what might be wrong. It’s best done alongside other activities and can add weight to user testing findings.

Service design will help you recognise which parts of an entire service or process don’t work for customers, and help you fix them.

We don’t know enough about our users !

This is a great place to start. It’s better to find out about your users early, rather than start with incorrect assumptions.

Related services:

Usability testing is the most common way and involves getting small numbers of your customers (typically 5 – 10) in to watch them.

Surveys this gives you quick and inexpensive data about who your users are, and what they do on your site.

User interviews – go deep with a few customers to understand common mental models, assumptions and attitudes.

Focus groups – great for early in a product lifecycle to understand customer’s attitudes to a new product or concept.

Users can’t find information on our website

We see this most in large content-rich websites where finding information is important to the users. The most common reasons users can’t find stuff on website are:

Broken structure (including groups that aren’t mutually exclusive).

Meaningless names for sections.

Navigation that does not support the information architecture.

We are creating something new and we want our customers to love it

The best way we know to make customers love a product or website is to follow a user centred design process. The first step is to find out about your customers, and then to iterate your product early and often, getting feedback from user’s throughout.